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How To Video

Make an external hard drive

Give your old hard drives a new lease on life. Sharon Vaknin shows you how a drive from an old laptop or desktop can be repurposed for use with your current computer.

3:17 / 29 August 2012

Transcript

--
The other old desktop or laptop lying around you also have -- all the hard drive that you could be using as an external hard drive.
All you need to do is remove that storage and put it in an enclosure together they make a pretty cheap external hard drive.
But -- not and you got there are few things he needs -- now.
If you -- -- drive from a laptop it'll be 82 point five inch drive that looks something like it.
If you -- that internal drive out of a -- -- it'll be a lot bigger. A 3.5. Inch drive that looks like it.
Most are gonna be dealing with a faded drive but if -- drive came from an older machine from the 42003.
It'll be -- heat a drive so just keep that in mind.
Not know what kind of drive you have it's time to start thinking about being -- though there are few things you'll want to look for.
First of all make sure -- picking the right size for your drive.
A 2.5 inch enclosure looks like this and an enclosure for a 3.5 inch drive looks and likeness.
One difference that you'll notice with this one is I don't know -- with an AC adapter which means a little ball here and not so good for portability.
Next you'll want to pick your external --
That determines what kind of connection you'll use to hook up your drive.
In most cases you'll go to USB 2.0 connection because any computer can connect with.
But if your computer can take USB three point oh or firewire go with that those are faster connection.
Now you have those detailed out of the way it the last thing to consider is that what the enclosure is made out --
When you're shopping for -- closures you'll notice have become an aluminum or plastic.
Always go with aluminum it'll keep your drive a lot cooler.
Okay once you have enclosure hand all of plot to do is put it together and that's really simple -- grabbed my hard drive.
And put these two connectors together.
Now I'll take this part -- -- in the enclosure.
--
-- my mini USD in here.
Connect both of these USB cords two mile up top.
-- --
There is my computer recognize that just like it would any other drive.
So now I can open it up browse some really old files on here or I can reformat -- and start with a clean slate.
If you have any questions during this process please let me know on Twitter and check out the accompanying blog for more tests.
For cnet.com. And -- back.

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